even more anime watching

I've been keeping up with the anime watching. I was a little afraid I'd stop, but I haven't - I've kept going. And I'm also keen to keep going.

I think one thing that's really helped was hacking back my telly watching. I'm kinda at a stage where I've nothing to watch except anime. Now normally the risk there would be that I'd play Anno instead.

But I've also had a help there too - for a little while I've had quite a lot of pain in my right shoulder. I don't think it's from over-use of the mouse as I'm fairly sure I strained it, but I am finding that even mouse use at work has been a bit uncomfortable, which has discouraged me from doing much computer wise in the evening.

Unfortunately, extended periods of staring at subtitles has made something else apparent to me - I really need some new glasses. I've been getting headaches and so I think my prescription has changed. But even if it hasn't I'm not surprised - my current glasses are so covered in scratches, that it's like looking through frosted glass.

I've known for a while they were getting bad, but as I say, staring at subtitles that are blurry really brings it home.

Anyway, I finished Mnemosyne last night.

Overall I enjoyed it. There were a few plot holes, as is normal with anime, but overall it did wrap up pretty well. I'm going to do a full review of it on trismugistus.com later, so I won't go into too many details.

However, I also managed to find the time to sample more fansubs, so here's some mini reviews:


Seikon No Qwaser

Seikon No Qwaser is about the power of boobs.

Well, it's not entirely about boobs. It's also one of those shounen series of the D-Grayman type, where the creator has just taken a bunch of random stuff and his favourite series and blended it together.

Here we have some vaguely Christian religious stuff, some alchemy, plenty of fighting, a bit of magic and mystical powers, lashings of fan-service and the aforementioned boobs. Or rather, more specifically, what I think is roughly breast feeding where 'soma' is sucked out of a ladies chesticles.

I say 'think', because the censorship is a bit on the heavy side - it cuts to some random images or the shots are framed weirdly so that you can't see anything. Recent shows with heavy fanservice have tended to use extreme shadows to hide stuff, although you could still roughly see what was going on - here you're really left to guess.

So plenty of fan-service, but you can't see it. Also, it sits on that side of the line where the fan-service is wrapped up into a story element that's so artificial it just becomes annoying. I think shows like Ikki Tousen, Queens' Blade or Kanokon work for me because they're happy to ladle in the fanservice and don't feel guilty about it.

Fan-service is great, so they show it. They don't come up with bizarre and non-sensensical plot elements as an excuse to have it. Well, okay, they do, I suppose, but they don't pretend the fan-service is incidental to that.

I was rather surprised that this was based on a manga, rather than a light novel. Light novels seem to be the home of hackneyed cliché and this is that sort of show.


Kuchu Buranko (trapeze)

Er... okay.

This was a bit of an odd one - both in terms of animation style and what it's about.

The animation was an odd mix of purely drawn stuff, CG and real-world stuff that was either filtered or possibly rotoscoped. It's also a complete riot of psychedelic colours and patterns and there's plenty of weird symbolism going on.

The story is equally odd, being as it focuses on a psychiatrist who appears to be a kid dressed in a clown suit. And the people who come to see him have very weird problems.

I dunno - I can't really explain it, other than to say it kinda works. And it works because it's so weird, but in a consistent way. The weirdness of the style actually complements and enhances the weirdness of story, which is perfectly matched by the weird style.


Umineko No Naku Kori Ni

I don't really know much about Higurashi: When they Cry. I've never seen any of the episodes or read the manga (I think there's a manga? I have a weird notion it's actually a video game originally). I've never even read any summaries of it or anything like that.

I've seen some images via the Japanese anime mags and as scans and wallpapers of course, and from those I kinda picked up it was a horror job, but other than that, nothing.

As such I didn't know what to expect from Umineko - was it a sequel or prequel or side story or basically unrelated? Obviously I can't answer that question, but my guess is that it's thematically similar. In other words, it's a horror, mystery job.

Often I don't like the anime and manga horrors - the disconnect for it to be an animated character makes them less effective. However, I quite liked this. I mean I wouldn't say I was scarred by it, but it looked quite interesting and worth a go.

I'm even tempted to pick up Higurashi and see what that's like.


Aoi Bungaku

Aoi translates to blue. Bungaku appears to be something akin to literature that's written in the form of a diary. I'm guessing, but I therefore think the title roughly translates as Blue Diaries - the blue possibly being a reference to mood as well as the colour blue.

Perhaps that's more a western spin - I don't know if the Japanese regard blue as being a particularly melancholy colour or if they have an expression equivalent to "feeling a bit blue." If they don't it's quite a coincidence, because melancholic diaries would probably be quite a good title for this series.

I only sampled the first two episodes and apparently the series actually adapts 6 classical Japanese literature pieces across it's 12 episodes. As such, I can only really talk about the first of these and overall I enjoyed it. It was pretty miserable though, from what I watched. I dunno, maybe it has a happy ending of some description, but the first two eps aren't exactly a barrel of laughs.

Which isn't a bad thing - it's good to have all sorts of moods in stuff.

dara o'briain talks funny: live in london

Something a little different for the DVD rental this week - a live comedy DVD.

Also, I've actually seen this before. Well, sorta. Basically, it's been on telly and I watched it then.

I could have therefore not bothered with the DVD, but I've found before that they tend to trim live comedy DVDs down when they show them on telly. Often they don't remove a lot, but it does mean you get some new gags when you watch the full DVD.

Plus in this case, I enjoyed the telly viewing enough that watching the DVD was still funny. And there was some bonus stuff too - nearly an extra hour of material recorded in Dublin in Ireland on the same tour and a "kinda of" commentary which also had David Mitchell on it.

I'd been aware of O'Briain for a while, but mainly form him appearing on panel shows and other comedy stuff on telly. He also does Mock the Week, which I've seen a few times, but never really got into, I have to admit. I mean, I always found him quite funny, but it was on QI I think that I found out he was from my 'neck of the woods' as it were.

I don't mean literally in the way that phrase is often used - I'm not Irish or of Irish descent or anything - I just mean that he studied Physics at University and is also a proper atheist.

I'm a physics person and a proper atheist too, and I was glad to see that this does make it into his stand-up material. If I'm honest it did get a little bit preachy at one point and it wasn't the funniest bit of the show, but it's good when people stand-up and get counted, as it were.

Anyway, the funniest stuff on the DVD is when he's talking to the audience. I guess it's quite old school stuff, but I've not seen it done in a while. What he essentially does is ask people in the audience about themselves and what they do and things like that.

Now sometimes that can be done in quite a nasty way, but here, although O'Briain does kinda take the piss on occasion, but it's in a gentle ribbing fashion, rather than being nasty.

There are also a few more general questions he puts out to the audience in general and he either riffs on the answers or again talks with a particular audience member.

Which isn't to say the whole show is on that improv vein, there's plenty of pre-prepared material. It's also clear he has a kind of 'bank' of stuff that he can go to if the bits from the audience go in a particular direction.

So yeah, it's a good mix of different types of funny stuff and I enjoyed it a great deal.

The extras are also nice. The Dublin stuff is a bit Irish-centric, so some of it just doesn't work - a bit like if you'd never seen Star Wars and he did a Star Wars gag. Still, plenty of it is more general and he does explain some of it, knowing the cameras are there.

The chat/commentary/drinking game with David Mitchell is also quite good. It's a bit random if I'm honest, but there's some funny points and O'Briain is happy to mock his own stuff, so it works well.

off the boil a bit

Last night I was re-reading the latest Air Gear volume (the latest translated into English this is) and it occurred to me that Oh! Great's (OG's) stuff has gone off the boil a bit.

As well as Air Gear, OG does a manga called Tenjho Tenge. They're both very much in a similar vein, although TenTen is a bit more adult that Air Gear. Both are essentially that speciality of boy's manga - fighting/tournament series.

I won't go into too much detail as I've reviewed both over at trismugistus.com, but basically TenTen is about people properly fighting fisticuffs style and Air Gear is about skating teams who use special powered skates called Air Treks.

There are still plenty of things I like about both series. The artwork is amazing - OG's stuff seems to just get better and better. Going along with that, the echhi fan-service is also pretty top notch. OG's girls are pretty damn hot and there's plenty to enjoy on that front.

Also the way he draws the fights and battles is good and generally speaking I enjoy the characters. I have to admit that slightly oddly I tend to prefer his supporting characters to the main characters, but then to some degree these are ensemble series.

The problem is that both appear to be disappearing up their own backsides.

In TenTen there was a part where it flashed back to show you the recent history of some of the characters. We're not talking far - a couple of years, back when they first joined the high school.

Now this was a double-edged sword - he seemed to get really carried away and this flashback went on for loads of volumes. So may that when we got back to the present it was like he'd gotten bored of his original story and decided to bugger about with it.

Unfortunately this meant a flashback even further to Samurai times. One of the big problems here was it was involving all sorts of new characters who'd never been explained to us before. I think the main problem is that many of these were characters from proper Japanese history, and, never having studied it, I got completely lost. Plus it involved a hell of a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo.

And unfortunately this story is essentially now that the manga is back to the modern day. So we've not only got the original threads and the first flashback threads, there's now this mystical mumbo-jumbo thread.

And it's this mystical mumbo-jumbo-ness that is also making Air Gear a bit naff too.

Part of the problem here is that I hate what I think of Dragonball-type stories. In these, a new, more powerful enemy keeps appearing and in order to beat them, the hero must learn a new technique or otherwise "level up". I find this sort of thing predictable and rather tedious.

Now fair enough, Ten Ten and Air Gear have both always had that sort of aspect to them and I've just lived with it.

The problem now is that OG has gotten a bit carried away with it all. So where previously the hero might have had to simply practice a lot to learn how to jump high and build up his muscles, now he has to learn something that's mumbo-jumbo-ish about, I dunno, controlling the flow of chi or walking on air pressure or some other nonsense that OG has read in a book and made weird.

Now if this was just once n a while it wouldn't be too bad, but it seems to have gotten to that Dragonball Z stage where it's happening all the damn time.

nearly good, but not quite

I actually watched some anime this weekend.

I think it's the first thing I've watched at the weekend since the star of the year. And it was on DVD and everything.

Before I get to excited I should perhaps say that it was only 2 episodes, but then to be fair the episodes each run about 50 minutes in length and it's a 6-episode series, so I'm a third of the way through.

The anime in question is Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne, which is a suitably odd title. As far as I can work out the daughters of Mnemosyne are the muses from ancient Greek mythology. The muses are kinda like figures that inspire art, I believe. To some extent the title does make a bit of sense with the anime, but that doesn't mean it's really about a Muse as such (well, that I know of so far).

I actually sampled Rin via fansub and enjoyed it so I bought it when it came out recently. I've actually been having a bit of a bad time with my sampling, as most of the stuff I've then gone on to watch hasn't been all that good.

I don't know if that's because I mentally hype them, or because the conditions of sampling affect the outcome. Generally speaking I've been watching the fansubs while I'm scanning, and that means I watch them in a very stop-start fashion. When you're scanning, you have to keep switching the pages, but each scan can take a couple of minutes, which is why fansubs are ideal. Unlike, say, a DVD fansubs stop and start instantly with no problems.

But does that make them a true sample? Is being broken up into bits helping some shows that are actually a bit dull seem more interesting?

I think the answer might be yes in some cases, but also I think, any sampling can be prone problems. I mean, I've encountered quite a few shows fansub-wise where I enjoyed the first ep and then further eps weren't so good, so if my sample stops and a similar thing happens, I've no way of knowing.

Plus a lot of it depends on mood - if you're catching a show when you're in the mood for that type of thing then you'll look on it more favourably than if you watch it when you're not in the mood.

Also, I've noticed quite a few shows I've sampled, liked and bought but not watched have gotten some good reviews, so I think ultimately the problem is more I happen to have picked the duffers to watch on DVD. In other words, the giant pile of anime contains plenty of gems, I just haven't hit any.

Well, until now - I really quite enjoyed the two eps of Rin I watched and I'd only watched the first one on fansub, so that's a really good sign.

I also made a special effort this weekend to watch the things I'd recorded and, more importantly, to prune out stuff from my recording schedule. I've actually managed to get it down to only about a dozen shows that I'm mainly watching as ongoing series. That bodes really well both for the week ahead and next weekend.

Plus I actually feel really in the mood for watching some anime, which if I'm honest I'm not sure I have for quite a while.

winter olympics sans snow

The winter olympics start today.

On the whole, sport isn't really my thing. The only sport I really follow is Formula one and I also have a passing interest in most other forms of motor sport. However, what I would say is that the winter olympics do have some interesting events. Certainly more interesting that the summer olympics.

I'm not a big fan of stuff on skis or skateboards, but I like all the ones where they careen down an ice course in a toboggan or what amounts to a tea tray. I also quite like the more team based events - curling is particularly interesting (I've always really enjoyed sports of that nature - bowling like sports - when I've played them) and the Scots are quite good at it too, which always adds something.

Anyway, I was chatting about it with a work colleague the other day and I was saying that although it's been unusually cold here (and in the USA, interestingly), the rest of the world has been quite warm and I'd heard that Canada was lacking snow. Which kinda shows how, even though I've said I'm vaguely interested, I've not really been paying much attention.

The reason not was because he informed me that indeed, the bit of Canada that's hosting the games - British Columbia, I believe - has had very little snow. So I asked how they were going to hold the games and he told me that they've actually been shipping snow up from the US.

I found this highly amusing - the idea that the slopes, etc have had to have snow dug up from America and shipped up North. Not in a bad way - it's just odd. Apparently it's happened several times before, though and they solved it in exactly the same way by shipping the snow to where it was needed.

I've been having a weird couple of weeks at work where things seem to come in big peaks and troughs. So for example, the start of this week I had very little to do, but then Wednesday and yesterday absolutely loads. It's all a bit confusing.

Sorry this post is a bit random and rambly. I looked back at my previous Friday posts the other day and realised they're always full of me saying how I'm hoping to do some stuff over the weekend but expecting I'll be rubbish and not do it, so I wanted to post about something else.

more cold

It's been really cold again this week.

Quite frankly I'm getting rather bored of it being cold all the time. And I mean all the time - if feels like for the last 2 or 3 years it's never stopped being cold.

I mean, sure, I remember the summers, but they seem to have been really short-lived compared to the winters. That is, when it's not raining, of course. A few years ago the summers seemed to go on forever, with months of really hot weather - that's why I bought my air conditioner. To be fair, I hate hot weather too, but I'm just getting sick of feeling cold all the time.

Which is to say what makes the cold weather worse is that the heating where I work is really crap. I work in a single, open plan office, although it's not that large because we're a small company. There are lots of radiators on the walls, but they just don't seem to heat the space properly.

I think there are a multitude of problems. First, off there's a lot of window area. That's great for making the room light, but you loose a lot of heat through windows - even double glazed ones. Second, I think the insulation in the roof is rubbish.

But most importantly I think it's because the heating is off for long periods of time. I know for a fact that it switches off a good few hours before going home time and doesn't come on until I'm coming in (about 8am). Also, it's off all weekend, which I think is why it starts to feel warmer towards the end of the week.

Then there's the heating at home. It's electric, which is really inefficient. Plus where I am is really drafty and 'full of holes' where my landlord has done a rubbish job at DIY instead of getting builders in to do it properly.

Recently, my landlord went on holiday, and with it being so cold he said I should run a cable across from one of his sockets and run a heater from it (I've actually done this in the past without telling him ><;). His point was that if the pipes froze then that would cost him a lot more than the few quid it would cost to keep my heating going.

Anyway, I did this and left the heater on with the thermostat controlling it. I can't tell you how glorious it was to have the whole flat warm all the time. I've actually got this suspicion that it might be cheaper in the long run for me to leave a heater on all time and keep the place 'mildly warm'.

See, the problem is I tend to switch the heaters on full blast so it warms up the room I'm in and then turn them off again. Plus they're off during the day and at night, so it gets really properly cold. My suspicion is that this means more is used because I overheat the room. The difficulty comes in the fact that I'm not there all day and I don't have the heating on while I'm asleep, so it seems wasteful to leave a heater on all the time. But I've really no idea which works out cheaper.

Anyway, normally, the only time I really feel warm is when I'm in my car, or I say bugger it and slam my heating on full at home for a long time. Both of these cost a fortune in terms of heating - petrol is not cheap and my key meter is really quite expensive.

And that's the real rub, I think. As I say, I've always preferred winter, but I like winter where you go outside and it's cold and then you come in and it's toasty warm. Work is permanently cold and where I live is cold the majority of the time, so it's not really what I want.

I also get bored of wearing loads of clothes. As I type this I'm in my work clothes, but on top of my usual garb (socks, shoes, boxers, suit trousers, shirt and tie) I'm wearing the following: extra pair of socks, t-shirt, jumper and my suit jacket. If I hadn't run out I'd have a vest on too.

And I'm still cold (shows you how bad work is). But after a while I just get bored of it and want to strip off, especially at weekends. Sometimes I turn the heating up and wander about in my pants, which I know is really bad environmentally, but it's... I dunno, restrictive, wearing loads of layers all the time (especially since I still feel cold).

I do know one thing that works - exercise. The problem is, going for a walk or whatever isn't really appealing, especially when it's raining and snowing all the time!

man on wire

The weekend's rental was man on wire.

Man on wire was a documentary that came out a few years ago about Philippe Petit, who walked a high-wire between the world trade center buildings.

I was afraid that for me, the film would be something of a horror story. I suffer from severe acrophobia (fear of heights) and so the idea of watching some bloke walking a wire between two building some 400 and odd metres up sounded like it wasn't going to be much fun.

But the reality is that there isn't any actual footage of him doing the walk. There are some photos and some stuff shot from the ground, but this happened in 1974, just shortly after the towers were finished, so it's not like people had access to cheap camcorders.

In fact, in a way that would be my only real criticism - there's not much of him actually doing the walking. I know that's weird for someone who hates heights, but the build-up to it is so good and the documentary so well done that it feels like that's the only missing piece.

Also, there is footage of Petite doing a kind of preparatory walk between the towers of the Sidney bridge, so it kinda seems a shame that there's not anything from up on the towers. They also don't reconstruct that part, although there is reconstruction of most of the rest of it.

I guess the problem there is the elephant in the room - 9/11 when the towers were destroyed. The destruction isn't mentioned at all in the documentary and in a way it's actually good that it isn't. As it's been made, the film is like a tribute to the towers (and what Petite did of course) without dwelling on all the horrible aspects. It's like a memorial, rather than an obituary, I guess.

The tone of the film is just right. It's played like a sort of heist movie, which in many ways it was - what Petit did wasn't legal and he was arrested for it. But it's also a rather cheeky film. There's lots of little funny bits and you get the distinct impression that the whole caper was always just on the verge of collapsing.

What sees it through is Petite himself, shot basically seems to be so confident that it will happen that any set back simply doesn't phase him. He describes doing the walk as his dream and it's almost like because it's his dream it will definitely happen.

My favourite part of the film comes almost at the end, though. There's a nice feeling of French-ness throughout and the bit in question is very 'French' indeed. I won't spoiler it, but the thing that amused me is Petit tries to explain it, but really he should have just shrugged his shoulders and gone "I'm French - what do you expect?".

Which isn't a criticism, by the way - as I said, I liked it.

flake of the week

I've been really flaky just recently.

This is over and above my usual flakiness that is.

The best example is my windscreen. Before Christmas I visited my Dad down in Devon and on the journey down I got a stone chip in my windscreen.

Now it was impractical to do anything about it while I was down there and also it didn't spread. Sometimes cracks and chips can grow and spread, but this one hasn't changed at all - it didn't even react when I hit that huge pothole that bent my wheel.

Plus it'll cost me money to repair. It's not in my eyeline, which they often won't repair and would instead need to replace the screen, so it's only a small amount, but it's still money. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's one of those insurance jobs, so it really is a small amount, but still.

I think I've been blaming the weather for this one - it always seems to be either raining or snowing recently and I don't think they can repair them when it's like that. Or maybe they can - I dunno, that's where the flakiness really comes into it.

Another example is my internet.

A while back John put in the wire to let me access his cable broadband. Since then I've been using it quite a lot and of course the whole intention was that I was going to switch my own phone line broadband off and hence same myself a lot of money.

Trouble is that the cable broadband is rather flaky itself. When it's working I can get some really high speeds, but they only allow you 1gb of bandwidth before they start throttling the connection. 1gb is not a lot.

And even when that's not in effect the connection speed can be all over the place - sometimes really fast, sometimes really slow, and unpredictably so. Plus, it completely dies a hell of a lot.

Now I know how to fix these deaths - you reboot the router by switching it off and on and it re-synchs itself. Problem is of course that I can't get in to do that, because it's in John's house. And h doesn't use the net a lot so he sometimes doesn't notice for several days.

Which all means I can't get rid of my broadband. I therefore had a look for something cheaper and none of the other packages people offer are as good as my current one. So what about downgrading? Well, although there are cheaper options from the same company I'm worried that if I switch something will go wrong.

I've no idea how to change the IP of my router, for example, so I'm worried that if I change it'll go tits up. I could probably sort this out by phoning them, but as previously noted, I've been really flaky about this stuff and haven't bothered.

And there's loads of other stuff. For example, I've got loads of e-mails flagged as needing action covering everything from buying some more clothes to joining forums.

I'm just being totally rubbish.

I also keep wondering where the time goes. I remember not so long ago I had the time to watch anime and scan stuff and do all these little jobs as well, but just recently it seems like I don't have any spare time to do anything.

And then I remember - I must spend at least 8 hours every week playing Anno, absolute minimum. When you factor in work and sleep and shopping all the other crap I have to do that's a huge chunk of all my spare time.

telly, telly, telly

As I suspected on Friday I didn't manage to watch all of the telly I had recorded. I got further than I thought I would, but part of that was because I dumped a good half-dozen things. What I've basically got left is the last episode of Wallander and now all 3 parts of the Great Rift wildlife series.

Crucially what I've also done is heavily prune my recording schedule as well. There's still quite a bit of stuff, but then it's that time of year when telly is quite good. However, what I'm hoping is that if I don't get distracted during the week I'll be able to watch a good chunk of it as I go and then next weekend I'll have a much smaller list of stuff.

My plan is to then turn my attention to putting a big tick in the box of stuff I've been really crap at addressing. By that I mainly mean watching some anime and doing some scanning, but also updating my site - I've got a few reviews written (and many more pending), but I need to scan in DVD covers and then make them into actual pages for my site.

I'd actually been hoping I'd pull my finger out and do some scanning this last weekend, but instead I played quite a lot of Anno 1404. The problem is I'm so close to 'completing' the map (by which I mean filling it with inhabitants and stuff to support them) that I keep thinking "just a few more hours and I'll be there".

The problem is that actually deep down I know it's going to take a hell of a long time for me to actually get to that stage. I'm close, but also a long way off. I'm also rather aware that at the end of the month the expansion comes out. I don't know whether to play with reckless abandon or to pray I exercise some sell control with the expansion.

Anyway, last week I got the chance to sample a few more anime shows:

Nyan Koi

I actually kinda enjoyed this. Maybe I really have lost my resistance to the repetitious nature of a lot of anime shows, because this is basically a high-school romantic comedy, harem-esque show and I've seen millions of those.

In my defence, in this series the main guy is not a total douche bag. Often the protagonist of these is a pain in the arse or a complete loser, or, even worse, downright unpleasant. Here, although he's shy around the girl he loves, that's about as far as it goes - he's not unpleasant, as such.

The twist of the show is also quite a nice one - he's cursed by a cat god and must perform 100 nice deeds for cats to lift it, but he's also allergic to cats. It's daft, but it kinda works.


Ladies versus Butlers

This appears to be a kind of 'sequel' to Kanokon. By that I mean it's by the same team/studio and is very ecchi and even appears to also be based on a Light Novel.

I've not got a very high opinion of light novels. They seem to either be really very good (Baccano is based on a light novel) or they seem to basically be the worst kind of cliché/trope ridden pap (Asura Cryin, for example).

Kanokon pretty much fell in the later camp, but because it took the ecchi right up to the line of very nearly being pr0n and had some good gags, I actually quite liked it. LvB tries to do the same basic trick, but this time I'm not so sure.

I dunno, I think it's because it's doing the light novel thing of ladling in as many of the typical and clichéd characters as possible that it gives a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth. Which isn't to say I didn't kinda like some of it, just that it didn't work for me quite as well as kanokon did.

i forgetted

I completely forgot to do a blog update yesterday.

To be fair I've been really busy at work, so I do have an excuse.

I've been debating whether to turn comments on for this blog. I originally turned them off because it's kinda depressing having a blog where no-one comments. By turning them off that's not a problem.

See if, as I'm pretty sure, no-one is reading this blog then having comments disabled kinda means I'll never find that out. Also, if some random people do happen to stumble across it and read it, but can't be arsed to comment (it's is a pretty dull blog, after all) then I'll never get the false impression no-one reads it.

Ignorance is bliss, in other words.

I guess I've been debating turning it on because it makes me feel a bit... I dunno, a bit like I'm one of those people at speakers corner who get on their box and shout at the trees and no-one pays them any attention.

Of course the flipside is that I may well be one of those people. Admittedly I'm not ranting and raving about any old random stuff... oh, no, wait... yes I am.

Hmm. I think I'll leave it off for the mo.

I'm getting swamped by telly programs at the moment - the hard-drive on my PVR is bursting with stuff. More than I can probably watch across the entire weekend. Certainly more than I can cope with without TV watching fatigue setting in.

Admittedly I've not got a whole lot else I need to do this weekend so I will probably watch plenty, but the problem seems to be there's a lot on at the moment. Especially in terms of documentaries - there's quite a few wildlife things on that I'm watching and also more random documentary stuff.

I've a feeling I may prune some stuff out.

Well the day away didn't make this any more interesting a blog, huh?

transporter 2

This week's DVD was Transporter 2.

I did one of these mini-reviews on the first Transporter and my basic opinion was summed up by my last line - "So yeah, silly, but an enjoyable kinda silly.".

So what about the sequel?

Well, the most important headline I guess is that I also enjoyed this one too. It's wasn't quite as silly as the first one, though it had a few silly bits, but still basically worked.

It also feels 'bigger'. It feels like they had a bit more money and that they wanted to expand the scope and scale a bit. It also feels a little less Besson-esque, although he is still credited as a Producer. In particular, the car chases don't have quite as much of that witty Besson touch, but they are more spectacular.

It's also set in Florida, rather than France, so the whole film has less of a fish a little out of his water feel that was noticeable in the first film.

There are quite a few interesting touches though. For example, this time it's a kid in peril, rather than a girl. Which isn't to say the film is without a female contingent, but being is it's the child's mother, this aspect plays out in an interesting way. I won't spoiler it, but lets' just say it plays out in a way that maintains Statham's hero status, but therefore doesn't conform to the usual action movie tropes.

Which isn't to say there aren't some problems with the film. Some of these are forgivable (the French police detective able to access a computer that surely would have had a password at the very least), but others are more glaring.

A good example is when the kid is found there's a bit where they literally just say "we've found the boy". How the hell they find him is totally unclear - there's no clue from the kidnappers or anything that would really give away his location.

Other examples would probably spoiler the story too much, but something I will mention is that in the film there's basically a virus and an antidote. The virus is bright green and the antidote is bright purple. It really gets on my nerves when they do stuff like that - bright green and purple. Yes, of course all medicines are brightly coloured....

Oh, and there's a chase involving the police that gets a bit Blues Brothers, in that hundreds of police cars seem to get trashed - many in slightly odd ways - just like in the Blues Brothers. You end up wondering if there are any police cars left in the entire state of Florida :/.

As with the first film, this one is suitably short and punchy, and you're never that far from a fight or a car chase. And despite reigning it in a bit there are also some good gags in there too.

So again, I would say a little silly, but an entertaining silly.

go, go gadget show

A new series of the gadget show started last night. That meant my gradual return to my usual routine reached a bit of a zenith. I pretty much did the same routine last night what I do most every Monday and you know what? It felt kinda good.

I've mentioned before I'm a creature of habit and routine and with all the disruption that's been going on over the last few weeks (if not months) it was just plain nice to do the usual stuff.

The gadget show itself featured a bit on e-readers. E-readers are basically electronic books and for a while now they've been looming about, threatening to do to books the same thing MP3 did to music.

The idea is we ditch all our physical copies of things and we go electronic. You buy e-books via download and then they're stored on the e-book instead.

In a way, it's odd that books are lagging behind in this way. I mean, the vast majority of stuff you do on the internet involves reading, so why weren't books and magazines the first things to make that leap to being e-media?

I think a big part of it is that the other things were taken there by piracy. Music especially involves fairly small files that you can move about easily and there are loads of programs available for ripping CDs, etc. Books, how much of a pain in the arse would it be scanning in all the pages? I mean, I can't be arsed to scan a few magazines, imagine doing all the pages in all the books I own.

Another problem is that staring at small LED screens is tiring on the eyes. They're also very power hungry with their backlights. There's this e-ink stuff of course, but then I don't know how much that costs as a technology. Certainly e-readers all seem to be very expensive.

Yes, you're getting the capacity to store thousands of books, but those books also still need to be paid for. And imagine breaking it and loosing all of your books? I mean, you could back them up and stuff, I guess, but you couldn't re-sell them as second hand books.

And e-ink doesn't do colour, so that sort of goes against this idea that magazines and newspapers are part of the available content. And what about non-fiction books? And text books? And reference books?

Then you've got to factor in the tactical tactile joy that is reading a book.

I dunno, I'm guessing the day when it all goes digital is inevitable, but I won't be happy when it does.

And to cap it all off, in terms of the gadget show, the e-readers didn't fair very well in the reviews. Even the much-vaunted Amazon Kindle didn't do very well.

Of course the review couldn't look at this new iPad thing from Apple. I think they've kinda shot themselves in the foot with that myself. They've basically produced a tablet PC and given it something called iBooks, which is like iTunes for books.

But the problem is it's big and heavy and uses an LCD screen and so it's a hybrid beast where I think they should have focused more on doing a proper e-Reader and revolutionising that market.

Not that I mind, as I say, because I don't exactly want it to happen any time soon.

busyness

I was incredibly busy this weekend, and yet I didn't get everything done that I needed to.

I did a lot of stuff, though. I got my hair cut, did some food shopping, did a massive pile of ironing, cleaned my bedsit, burnt a bunch of watched anime shows to DVD, watched my rental DVD and watched loads of telly. And on top of that I even baked a bread pudding and made my super-bolognaise sauce.

And yet I've come out of the weekend with four unwatched TV shows and a bunch of things like updating my website, getting some stuff on e-bay and reading all of the pile of unread comics (I read about half a dozen, leaving a dozen) either not even attempted or hardly dented.

Plus I've still not got my life sorted out in terms of stuff like scanning or watching the huge pile of unwatched DVDs that still seems to be growing, even though I've tried to reign myself in a bit. I mean I've even somehow managed to enlarge my unread manga pile, even though I read loads of stuff over Christmas.

Plus I didn't get around to looking at buying some new clothes or booking someone to fix my windscreen (I got a chip before Christmas when I was going down to Devon to see my Dad) or the other stuff that I've been putting off because it'll cost me money.

I dunno - it was like there just weren't enough hours in the weekend, and I didn't bother going out or anything.

I really need to come up with a proper plan for some of this stuff.

a half-arsed anime catch up

I've found the time to sample a few series over this last week or so.

Normally I would aim to watch 3 episodes as a sample, but I'm so far behind that I only watched 2 episodes of these to help me make some inroads. Not that I've watched a lot of stuff, just that I've been having a go.

Seitokai no Ichizon

I wasn't really sure what to make of this. It seemed... I dunno - insubstantial?

The basic idea seems to be sort of a bit like Haruhi. In Haruhi, you've got quite a clever idea whereby Haruhi is interested in aliens and time travel and anime tropes like that, and she's surrounded by characters who are those things, yet she never realises.

In Seitokai no Ichizon I think it's supposed to be playing with the idea of Harem and Moe tropes, but to be frank, it just doesn't work as well. It kept falling into its own clichés and while I think this was deliberate, it's just not as well done as Haruhi. Plus it doesn't really help itself by skimming on the edge of being a "whacky" comedy and so not being very funny.

I guess it's the sort of show I could watch if there weren't a million other (better) things and I wouldn't really remember it after it was over.


Hanasakeru Seishounen

This is essentially what I believe is called a reverse harem show, which essentially means that instead of a male protagonist surrounded by gorgeous women, there's a female protagonist surrounded by gorgeous men.

As far as that sort of thing goes, this seemed like a perfectly okay show, but to be frank, it's not really my cup of tea. I mean, although the focus is on romance, rather than boobs as it would be in a harem show, they're not generally a particularly realistic genre. Not that normal harem is, but at least there it's feeding me fantasies that I can appreciate.


Sasameki Koto

Sasameki Koto seemed quite good. It's one you need to be in the right frame of mind for, though, I think.

The story is one of unrequited love, I guess you would say. The main character is clearly in love with her best friend and her best fried is an 'out' lesbian, but the problem is her friend likes cute girls and she's not very cute. Weirdly, the main character actually fits more into the mould of those strong women you get in girls animes that all the other girls fall in love with. She's very tall and athletic and clever.

The reason it's one you need to be in the right move for is because it's very melancholic. The friend keeps falling for all sorts of other girls and the main character never tells her how she really feels - that sort of stuff. So it's sad, but well done.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

I guess this show highlights just how far behind I am with watching anime - Brotherhood started airing in April of 2009, so in a few weeks it'll be a year old and I'm only now sampling it.

I'm also pretty new to FMA full stop. I've never seen any of the previous version of the anime and although I've bought all the manga, I've only read the 1st volume, with the other 20-odd sat in a big pile awaiting my attention.

I believe Brotherhood is a re-telling of the original anime that's closer to the manga, but as I say, I've not seen that, so I can't really comment. What I would say is I really enjoyed these first few episodes I sampled and I can definitely see why it is/was so popular.


One thing I have been doing is continuing to read manga. I find it a lot easier to keep manga reading going, as I can easily stop half way through chapters, or only read for 10 minutes. And I can read it at breakfast and lunch, of course. I can't really do that with anime - episodes don't work well if you only watch a bit of them and I have to sit and watch them on telly.

Also, I tend to always feel I need to watch a full disks worth when I watch it, which is part of the problem. Doing that means it's going to be an hour and a half of my time (4 episodes on a disk, on average) and when I start thinking like that I start thinking stuff like "I don't have the time, I'll do X instead".

Anyway, one of the manga was a new series:


Sunshine (Hidamari) Sketch

I picked up Sunshine Sketch because I enjoyed the anime adaptation. It turns out the manga is one of those 4 vertical panel jobs. Really I should have guessed from the anime, which is staged like a series of short vignettes, which is a common approach when adapting these types of manga.

The manga is pretty good. It's very Japanese, though. There's one of those translators notes sections at the back and it's written in tiny font with loads of stuff crammed in. I also get the feeling they've deliberately tried to keep it to one page and there's plenty of stuff that could also be explained.

However, unlike with something like Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, this doesn't really matter. There's the odd strip that you need the notes to understand, but overall you should be okay, especially if you have some general knowledge about Japan from other anime and manga.

Otherwise it's pretty good. It's quite light in tone and is a slice of life type show. The main character Yuno is attending an Arts based high school and once she's there it actually becomes something of an ensemble piece, focusing on all the girls who live at the Hidamari Apartments with Yuno.


The big box I need to tick this weekend is getting my hair cut. With the weather and holiday I've not had it done in ages, so it looks bloody awful.

a mosque of sultanas

Normally when it gets to the middle of the week I play anno in the evenings. I've reigned in the anno playing so that it's not all pervasive, but I still play it a lot. I've also been quite good this time at sticking with the same map, rather than starting a completely new one and therefore effectively wasting all the dozens of hours I'd invested in the old one.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I'm on the verge of hitting two of the big milestones. Last night I completed the Sultan's Mosque building on one of my islands. The sultan's mosque is a great big building that takes a heck of a lot of resources to complete. On the good side it does allow you to build a lot of houses in its influence area and not have to worry about the extra stuff that your citizens (in this case, the nomads and envoys) need.

I've also very nearly finished my first Imperial Cathedral. It's basically the equivalent of the Mosque for the Occident (west) and does a similar job, ticking all the building requirements for your western citizens (peasant, citizens, patricians and nobles). It's resource requirements are even more onerous than the mosque, which is why I completed the Mosque first.

If I play tonight (I may wait until the weekend) I should finish the Cathedral as well - I'm that close. It's then my plan to build more of both, though I'll have to build up the resources required again. The ones that are the most difficult are glass and mosaics, as they have the most complicated (and space consuming) production chains and seem to be slower too.

One thing that did surprise me when I finished the Mosque was the introduction of the Sultan as a new NPC. Normally you have the Corsairs and then a representative NPC each for the Occident and the Orient. Those Corsairs you have to befriend, but the other two are always your friend. Their respective bosses are the Sultan and the Emperor, and it seems you unlock them as direct NPCs by building the Mosque and Cathedral.

Unfortunately (or should that be fortunately?) t appears the expansion for anno is due sometime in February, which is basically in a few weeks. I'd kinda hoped I was going to finish this map before the expansion hit, giving me some time to not play Anno and catch up on other stuff. My fear now is that it'll hit and I'll be tempted away and not finish this map.

there will be blood

The first rental after the whole snow problems was There Will Be Blood.

I knew very little about Blood, other than it was about oil and it has received a lot of critical praise. Well, it turns out it's only sort-of about oil, but pretty much deserves he critical praise.

I say it's only sort of about oil, because my feeling about it was the film was more of a character study. The character in question - Daniel Plainview - just happens to be an oil man.

Or he becomes an oil man - initially he's a silver prospector who happens to strike oil. He's also working alone and manages to break his leg by falling down his mineshaft. Daniel then drags himself to some sort of claims office, where he gets exploitation rights. Well, I think this is what happens - the details are actually important in a way, because what we're experiencing is more to do with Daniel's character than his finding silver or oil.

And this is where the film plays its first clever trick. His dragging himself miles to the claims office with a badly broken leg shows us his determination, but it also makes us feel like he's a decent guy. You can't help but feel happy for him that his hard work and horrible accident was worth it as he finds riches.

Shortly afterwards, Daniel also adopts the son of one of his men who was killed in accident down his oil well. The son's mother died during childbirth, so he's an orphan and Daniel adopts him - he can't be a bad person, right?

But here's the thing - the rest of the film charts either his steady decline in character, or steadily reveals his true nature to us. Which it is is never definitively expressed, but then that's the point - is he a bastard all along, or does he become a bastard?

Certainly the people he encounters are mostly just as unpleasant. A preacher, Eli, plays a particularly important role. Eli is just as unpleasant in Daniel, with one of the only real difference between them being that Eli hides behind the facade of being a preacher - a man of the lord - where Daniel is a plain capitalist.

The central performance by Daniel Day Lewis is captivating - it's quite a remarkable portrayal. The score is also remarkable - it's just not what I was expecting at all. The score is orchestral, but it's really dark and sinister. If you've ever seen 2001 then the music that's used during the bit where they discover the monolith on the moon is how the whole film is scored. But it really works - informing you of the underlying nastiness.

However, there were a few things I didn't like. The main one was that we never get enough detail on the other characters. As a simple example, where Daniel sends H.W. away there's no detail at all - we certainly never see where H.W. ends up.

The other thing was I didn't really like the ending. I could see how it worked and how it paralleled other parts of the film, but I dunno, it had that un-nerving quality of just sort of stopping.

I know that sort of thing is more 'realistic', but that doesn't make it satisfying.

almost normal

Last night was about the closest to a normal night I've had in ages. By normal I mean it followed the expected routine.

Obviously, over Christmas I was on holiday, so that was very not normal. Then after Christmas was when it snowed. I was initially trapped in, so that wasn't normal, and then I was struggling into work, again far from normal, because it took ages and I had to get up really early and stuff.

And just recently I've been struggling with the whole bent wheel and driving on the space-saver. During that time I was again getting up early, to try to avoid the traffic (it didn't really work) and setting off later for the same reason (that worked better). But again - up very early and getting back late, which sucks up my time.

So yesterday was normal - I got up at my usual time, did the usual stuff, work was nothing unusual and then back home at the usual sort of time. I had my dinner and there was some spare time to watch a bit of telly, rather than me having to go straight to bed.

It was kinda nice, in a boring sort of way.

The telly I watched was the most recent couple of episodes of Being Human. I like Being Human - it shares a lot of similarities with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but at the same time it's very different.

The thing I like most is the blend of drama and comedy. I have to admit that for the first few episodes of this new series I think it wasn't quite right. It felt too heavy, emotionally. No, that's not right - Being Human often has heavy stuff in it, but it's the way they blend that with funny stuff that makes the show work, and it's the funny stuff that's been a bit lacking.

Well, the latest episodes, which was shown on Sunday had a much better balance. There was still a lot of heavy emotional stuff, but the funny was also ramped up - I genuinely laughed out loud a couple of times.

a hole in the pocket

So this weekend cost me about £320.

I ended up ordering the tyre from Nissan and it cam in on Saturday morning. Not that the guy called me. I'm not really sure why I keep using the Aldershot Westway Nissan dealership, as the customer service is shit.

I've always maintained that in terms of the back room - the mechanics, for example - they do a really good job, but the problem is the front end. Whenever I call them up and they say "do you want to leave a message and he'll call you back" I've learnt not to bother, because they never, ever do call me back. It's far better to simply call back.

I mean, the guy said he'd phone me when I ordered it on Friday, but he didn't. I had to call in and check. Of course, being Saturday, he was pretty busy, so I had to keep calling - on one of the occasions I did leave a message, but he didn't call back.

Anyway, the wheel had come in, so I limped to the dealership. It cost about £185 (ouch!).

I then limped all the way over to Alton Qwik Fit where the tyre I ordered was. That was a fairly painless process, because I'd ordered the tyre and I had lucked out with the timing and got straight in and served. Painless apart front he price that is - £135 (double ouch!).

Not heard a peep from this guy who was supposed to fix my bent wheel. It's like he's dropped off the face of the earth :/.

Saturday was about the first time I've driven around with it being light out. I thought I'd have a drive around with the new tyre and see where all the potholes were, plus I needed some petrol. The A31 is like a dirt track in places. There's one place coming off of the roundabout after Farnham where the hole is like a crevasse, it's so big and deep. The one I hit was like that, but they've patched that one up.

Anyway, when I got back on Saturday, I thought I'd give the old girl a bit of a treat after having to limp around with a lame leg all week and gave her a good clean. Unfortunately, the light faded before I'd finished, so I had to finish off on Sunday morning.

Weirdly, normally when I clean the car I get a lot of pain in my hamstring down the back of my legs from bending over so much. However, Sunday morning I was fine, but this morning I'm in agony. That suggests the little bit of bending down I did when finishing off on the Sunday had more impact than everything on Saturday, which is a bit weird.

I also couldn't be arsed to go the whole hog and polish the car. There was also another reason for that - I seem to have a lot of... well, they're not really scratches, as such - the paint isn't gone, but the finish seems to have come off. I dunno, it's a little difficult to explain, especially as I haven't a clue what has caused it.

I do have this stuff that claims to restore the finish, but I've never tried it, and I couldn't be bothered to start experimenting on the Sunday.

Anyway, it looks pretty good, so I'm fairly happy.

tyre-d out

Right then, so this tyre/pothole situation.

To summarise what I've posted - Monday on the way home from work I hit a pothole REALLY hard. Continued home, but failed to check the tyre that evening, because I'm stupid. Tuesday I drove in, I now realise with the tyre deflating. By the time I got to work the tyre was totally dead.

My plan was to hope for the best - assume it was just a knackered tyre, get it off at lunchtime, go down kwik-fit and start the ball rolling on getting new one.

The first problem was that I could not get the tyre off. There are four nuts that you need to unscrew and I could do three of them, but the fourth was one of these locking wheel nuts. The idea seems to be that there's a kind of "key" that fits onto the nut and clips into your wrench, but for the life of me I just could not get any purchase to turn it.

Luckily, I'm a member of the RAC, so I called them up. I called them at about 1:30pm and they said it would probably not be until 4pm that someone would get to me. Fine - I was at work, I wasn't going anywhere any way.

However, because I knew my tyres are rather rare, I thought I'd call kwik fit and try to get the ball rolling. So I did that, explain the tyre size and stuff and that all 4 of my current tyres are continentals. The guy said they'd need to check the stocks and get back to me.

So, 4pm rolled around and no sign of the RAC. I phoned them up, chasing, and they said it was going to be 6pm before someone could get to me! I appreciate I'm not pregnant and stuck by the side of the motorway, but come on - that's just taking the piss. 4 and a half hours to get to me!

Next thing, I hadn't heard anything from kwik fit, so I called them up. Well, it turns out that there are no Continental tyres in my size in the entire country! Not even Continental themselves have got any in stock!

Well, I know that you're not supposed to mix tread patterns on your driving wheels, which are the ones with power going to them. In my case that's the fronts and it was the front left that was knackered. However, the guy said we could order another brand - Pirelli in this case - and swap one from the back to the front.

The RAC guy eventually turned up at 5:45pm and of course he had the tyre off and changed in less than 5 minutes!

Unfortunately, I've got one of these shitty space saver tyres. That means I can't go above 50, and in reality I've been driving everywhere at 40, because it's far too easy to go above and if I was at 50 and did that, Christ knows what would happen.

Anyway, got home and decided I'd tidy up so that my tyre was in easy reach for the next day and I'd put all the bits and pieces for changing the tyre away too.

Well, while I was doing that, I noticed that the inside of the wheel - the inner rim - looked a bit funny. Using a tape measure, I was able to determine that the wheel is actually bent! There's a part of it that isn't as round as it should be! I'm guessing that's actually why the tyre deflated - I certainly couldn't see any holes in it.

But that also means I can't just put a new tyre on it - it needs properly fixing. I therefore investigated this on the internet that night and a guy I e-mailed called me right back.

He said it was going to be about £75 to repair, which isn't cheap, but is a lot cheaper than a new wheel. He also said it was going to take a couple of days (there are loads and loads of people hitting potholes and bending alloys because the roads have been fucked up by the recent bad weather)and he'd pick it up on Thursday.

So I've been driving on this crappy space saver in the meant time and it's not fun I can tell you.

And guess what? Thursday rolls around and there's not a peep from this guy at all. I phoned him up towards the end of the day and it just went straight to voicemail. So I e-mailed him late last night and I've not had a reply yet - to be honest, that's kind of fair enough, because it was late, but it also means he's still not answered my phone message.

It's getting silly - he also said it would take about 48 hours to repair, because of the backlog, so that means it'll be ages before it's done. I therefore phoned the Nissan garage this morning and asked how much a new alloy would be. It's more expensive - £180 - but he said I could have it tomorrow if I ordered by 11am (not sure this would actually be the case, but even if it was Monday, that'd be quicker).

The way I'm currently feeling about the situation I'll probably actually do both. That way I might be able to have an actual proper spare tyre, rather than this space saver shit.

babylon5: the lost tales

Y'know what? I can't be arsed to do a proper blog entry today, so instead I'm going to post the last of the mini-reviews of stuff I watched over Christmas. This weekend I can finally resume watching new stuff as my latest rental DVD finally turned up on Tuesday. The post has really been knackered after the snow - more so than when they were on strike!

I'm not going to spend much time explaining the show - go check out Wikipedia - but I was a huge fan of Babylon 5 back in the day.

For some reason, Babylon 5 never really broke through into the popular imagination in quite the same way as Star Trek and Star Wars have.

Now you could put this down to the fact that B5 is definitely hard sci-fi, but then Star Trek is actually surprisingly hard sci-fi. Star Wars is not really - it's set in space, but it fantasy more than it is SF, truth be told. And I think the difference with Star Trek is that it had a sufficiently large nerdy fan-base it managed to whether the storms.

Also, Star Trek was kind of a benchmark and let's be frank - occasionally things just manage to breakthrough. Be it timing or sheer quality or just random good luck, occasionally some niche things just manage to make that leap into the general consciousness.

Anyway, the point is I really enjoyed the B5 TV series, so when I saw heard about The Lost Tales I thought I'd rent it and see if it lived up to the original series.

B5's strength was always its storytelling. The budget was always more in the cardboard set realm, and it was a pioneer of CG when, to be frank, CG was in its infancy, but the point is that stuff didn't matter, because the writing was so good.

Well, I say that stuff didn't matter.

The Lost Tales kinda proves that actually, it does matter a bit. Because although the writing is okay, the severely limited budget kinda shows. I mean, there must only have been a dozen actors across both of the stories.

To be fair, they're cleverly set up so that you wouldn't expect big crowd scenes, but it gives the whole thing a stage-play feel, rather than living up to the standards of even the TV show.

I mean, the idea is both tales are set before a big ceremony on B5 to mark an anniversary. But we never get to see that ceremony, because that would need a big crowd.

More obviously there are quite a few bits of "Oh, do you remember Garibaldi? Will he be there?" "Oh no, he sent a message saying he couldn't make it." Which just ends up smelling of "we couldn't afford to get all the actors."

And unfortunately it's really noticeable.

Plus, to be frank, the two stories are actually inconsequential.

Given the huge, Space Opera scope of the original series, if these had appeared as actual episodes, they'd have been in the "filler" bracket, rather than really adding to the grand storylines.

And that makes them a little disappointing, to be frank.

Plus the first one is kinda on a religious theme and to me wasn't very satisfying as it kinda came across as "oh, btw, actually, God exists in the B5 universe" when religion wasn't really a big issue in the series. Not to mention it conflicting wit my personal views... and common sense.

public enemies

I'll stick with the traditional Wednesday mini-review today and leave updates on the tyre/wheel situation for later (it's not working out well).

Interestingly, I watched this at my Dad's while I was visiting him down in Devon.

He recently got broadband, as I've discussed on the blog before, and as part of the package he got BT Vision, which is an on-demand thing from BT. The box actually also gives him access to Freeview, which is digital television via your aerial, but we watched Public Enemies via a streaming service.

You actually pay for the films a bit like you would if you were downloading them from iPlayer or something like that; however, they appear not be downloaded, but streamed.

I was rather curious (and a little dubious) that this would work. He only has the most basic package, so his internet speed is not the greatest and I was puzzled what system it would use and how it would work.

As I've discussed before on the blog I know of two streaming types - YouTube style, where it caches the video and iPlayer style where you watch live. Unfortunately, BT Vision appears to use the latter method and presumably because his speed is not great, it didn't work very well.

If you've ever watched the iPlayer on a low bandwidth connection you'll know what I mean - it kept stuttering, which really affected the experience.

The odd thing, though was that picture quality was surprisingly good. I mean, I know TV is deceptive in that it's actually at quite a low resolution compared to most computer monitors, but it actually looked quite good. I'm guessing this was part of the problem - if the video was compressed a bit more, maybe it would have streamed better?

Anyway, the film itself seemed okay, although I guess that opinion could be affected by the poor viewing experience.

I think my biggest criticism about the film was that if felt like you needed to know about the period. It's basically about John Dillinger, who was a bank robber during the early 1930s.

Now the film looked like it was set during that period and the performances were quite good, but I dunno - it sort of lacked context. I mean, the 1930s was when the great depression happened and the early 1930s was also when America had prohibition.

Now while Dillinger wasn't a bootlegger, so I guess you could argue prohibition wasn't of quite a great importance, the Great Depression was. I mean, the whole mythos and rose-tinted view of gangsters, bootleggers and bank robbers was virtually caused by the depression.

The whole "Robin Hood" feel to them was erroneous, but it was what people felt about them and yet there's nothing that really conveys that in the film. I mean, unless you knew it was the depression, you really wouldn't have a clue from the film.

It lacked context in that sense.

I have to admit it also felt both too long and not long enough. In other words, it felt like they were trying to cram too much in, so you get an odd sense of jumping huge chunks of time in order to show little snippets, and yet because there were so many snippets it kinda went on a long time.

I've a feeling that was the aspect that was most affected by it stuttering, though.

I think generally if you watch the film I'd say do a bit of reading about who Dillinger was before hand and you may enjoy it a bit more.

fucking potholes

Last night I hit a pothole.

And when I say hit, I mean mother fucking hit (I should warn that this blog entry may be a little more sweary than usual as I'm a rather pissed off). It felt like I was mounting the curb. And since I was on the A31 doing the best part of 60 miles an hour it was not a fun experience. It was a massive jolt and a there was a huge bang as I guess the shocks slammed up to take the impact.

Unfortunately, however, when I got home I was not sensible.

When I got home I should have checked out the tyre. I can't really check out the suspension, but the tyre is easily checkable and I now appreciate I should have had a look.

The reason I should have had a look is because the tyre has punctured. I don't think it could have burst as I didn't detect anything odd on the rest of the drive home. However, the drive in this morning got increasingly worse as I went.

I realise now that this was the tyre deflating. It's currently sat in the office car park awaiting me putting the skinny space-saver tyre on.

And that'll be a fucking nightmare. I've never changed the tyres before and it's got one of those locking wheel nuts, which I bet will be a pig to do. That's assuming the garage hasn't done the usual trick of tightening the tyres to such a degree that even bloody Hercules couldn't get them off.

So now I have a catalogue of potential problems.

First off the obvious - I'll need a new tyre. My tyres are a special size that are both quite rare and fucking expensive. We're talking at least £100. That's a lot of money. This means that even getting it sorted now will mean it will be tomorrow before a new one arrives. That means I'll have to drive on the skinny tyre, which is not the safest thing to be doing.

Next up the alignment/tracking could have been put out, which is not a big fix, but obviously represents more money.

Then it gets horrible - the shocks could have been damaged, the springs could have been damaged, the wheel bearing could have been damaged or the damn steering rack could even have been damaged. Those are all fucking expensive.

This is all assuming I've not caused even more damage by running on a flat tyre like a stupid idiot. Which, knowing my luck, I'm sure I have.

sleep patterns

My sleep patterns are all over the place it seems.

Normally they get a bit messed up when I take a long holiday, but the other thing that's buggered them up has been the getting up early during the last week because of the snow.

Sunday's a good example - my fritzed body clock woke me up about 5:30AM. I tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use as I was totally wide awake. So instead, I just watched some stuff I'd recorded.

Then, by about 8:00PM I was utterly shattered. However, I knew that if I went to sleep I'd end up waking up early again, so I forced myself to stay awake and read some manga. Eventually I turned in at about 9:30PM, which was still a bit early, but I just couldn't keep my eyes open.

I must have fallen asleep instantly, as next thing I know I'm lying in bed totally awake again. I checked the clock and it was only 1:30AM, but again I was really awake. What didn't help here was that I think I've pulled a muscle in my back and it was aching.

I took some pain killers and read for about half an hour or so until they kicked in and was then able to get back to sleep. But then I was woken up by my alarm at 6:45AM, which never normally happens. I was really tired when I got up, because of the messed up sleep pattern, but I'm okay now.

Hopefully with the return to normality my body-clock will get back on track this week. I say hopefully, because I saw a forecast over the weekend that predicted snow on Wednesday.

The snow has basically cleared here to the extent that it's not a problem. There are still a few patches, mainly where it was piled up.

The weekend was suitably dull and quite relaxing. I did a big shop and restocked a lot of stuff and cleaned the flat, which got some of the domestics out of the way. I also received about a dozen parcels, which was all the mail that had built up that they hadn't been able to deliver.

They were all parcels though - letters must still be backlogged, as I seem to be lacking a few things I would normally have expected to come through.

watched stuff

So when I've not been at work or doing epic battle with the snow this week I've mainly been watching and reading stuff.

The main thing I've been watching is the second series of 30 Rock. I really like this show. I think it's very well written and pretty damn funny, but for some reason it's not generally very popular.

It's surprisingly actually because it's not hugely popular in America, and yet it's not been cancelled. Stuff get cancelled pretty quickly in America if it's not popular, or its popularity fades. I think what might be helping 30 Rock stay on air is something hinted at in the extras - NBC wasn't expecting it to be popular.

As such, because its rating seen to have stayed pretty stable and in some cases gone up, they may be pretty happy with it. Plus it apparently tests well in certain demographics. It's also a critical darling and has won a clutch of awards, including Emmys, which are some of the big ones.

I dunno - it's one of those odd things about American TV where it's all a bit random as to what's renewed and cancelled.

I'll be doing a proper review of it at some point, but I've got a lot of reviews to write and prepare after Christmas, so it might be a while before it appears.

I've also sampled a couple of anime shows:


Kampfer

This is a gender-swap comedy. It's got quite a lot of fan-service and the plot is quite predictable. There's lots of elements I've seen in other shows.

So it's not really innovative or original. Plus the animation rarely bobs above the 'basic' threshold. Also, the soundtrack is slightly odd, flipping into heavy metal when there's an action sequence, which really doesn't shit the bright, colourful visuals of the show.

But do you know what? I kinda enjoyed it.

I was rather surprised by this, and tried o pin down what it was that made me like it, but I really can't figure it out.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying it's amazing or ground-breaking or anything, just that I kinda enjoyed it.

Maybe it's just that I've been out of the anime loop too long?


The Sacred Blacksmith

The other show I sampled had much higher production values. The animation was much generally smoother, and the soundtrack fit the show better.

I must admit, though I was a bit torn over it. There was stuff I quite liked - the characters were quite interesting, for example. But then there were quite a few things I didn't like.

The background/setting is another one of those weirdly random anime things. Part standard fantasy, part mumbo-jumbo mystical stuff and part odd take on Christianity.

Also, the show is sort of about a Blacksmith, which I thought might be interesting, but it didn't really show much of that in the first few episodes. What it did show a bit of was the 'sacred' part and I didn't really like it.

It came across a bit like magically making the sword, and I dunno it just left me really cold. There's a big difference between the sweat and toil of making a sword (especially a samurai sword with all that folding) and just going all mystical mumbo-jumbo and conjuring one up.


Plans for the weekend are basically pretty dull.

My main aim, as mentioned yesterday, is to get a big shop in and to buy some electricity for the meter. Apart from that, I need to clean my flat.

Otherwise, it's sleeping and relaxing watching a bit of telly, I think. This week has really left me shattered.

bored of this now

I'm bored of the snow now.

On Wednesday it snowed again - well, it's snow several times, actually, but this was proper snow that covered the ground with an extra inch or so. And the journey to work was horrendous.

Part of the problem was that I hadn't gotten up early. Since this snowy weather started I've been getting up a bit earlier in attempt to beat the heavier traffic periods. But on Wednesday I was so tired I just couldn't do it again, so I got up at my usual time.

My usual time is actually pretty early anyway and I usually get to work at about 8AM or so. This is with setting off at 7:30, so in other words it's about a half hour journey. It should be quicker, truth be told, as it's only about 11 miles, with most of it on the A31, which is a dual carriageway.

Yesterday it took an hour and a half.

The problem really seemed to stem from the fact that the roads appeared not to have been treated at all. It's really difficult to describe, but there was a sort of weird texturing of the roads, caused by the compacting of the snow. It was like driving on a cobbled road, only made of icy clumps, rather than cobbles.

I'm pretty sure that if they'd been out and put salt down it wouldn't have been like that. Especially because the temperature was actually not that old. Which isn't to say it wasn't chilly, just not like it has been.

So the journey to work was an extremely slow crawl - everywhere it could be snarled up, it was. I mean, it took half an hour for me to even get down to the Shepherd and Flock roundabout, which is only about 3 miles or so.

I weird consequence of this is that I've strained my groin muscle. My car's clutch is really heavy, and when you're driving in traffic you're constantly using the clutch. SO this morning driving in my groin was aching like a bastard.

So yeah, I'm falling apart. I'm really tired and my groin aches. Plus my back still aches from the snow shovelling. Also my shoulders ache because of how stressful it all is. Driving in weather like this is just the most tiring thing ever

Plus, my diet's gone to pot. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't on a diet, I just mean that what I'm eating has gone silly. The office is really bad at warming up and my job means I'm really sedentary, so I end up eating more stuff to try to keep warm.

I've also not been risking going out at lunch, and of course evening I don't (and can't) go anywhere, so I'm getting a bit of cabin fever.

Add to that I'm going to have to do a big shop on Saturday to replace all my stocks and buy some more electricity, but they're still forecasting torrential rain and black ice, and you can see why I'm a bit bored of all this.

rocky balboa

So over the Chrimbo period I watched a few films via rental and just generally.

The first was Rocky Balboa, which, rather amazingly, is the sixth film in the Rocky series.

The idea with this one is it's meant to be a proper end to the series. We catch up with Rocky with him having completely retired from boxing, as he's getting on a bit, and running Adrian's - a restaurant named after his recently deceased wife.

I think over the years I've seen all of the Rocky movies. Certainly I've seen the first two and the fifth ones, which are the better of the Rocky movies. The third and fourth, from memory, were fairly forgettable.

So I've seen them all, but I'm not really sure if I'm a fan.

I mean, I remember enjoying the first one and I seem to recall the fifth one had something about it, but I dunno. I think one of my main problems was that the character of Rocky never actually seemed all that good of a boxer to me.

Now to be fair I can't honestly claim to be anything of an aficionado when it comes to the pugilistic arts, but I'm pretty sure boxing is about more than simply absorbing as many of the other guy's punches with your face. This seemed to be Rocky's entire strategy - he punches me in the face until he gets tired and then I win.

From memory he didn't really even seem to guard himself properly in an attempt to prevent some of the bows making contact. He'd just stand there taking a pounding until the other guy was knackered.

Anyway, the idea behind this film is broadly one of Rocky making something of a comeback. The film features a modern boxer who's become hugely unpopular and in order to boost his popularity they put together a show fight.

Now this could have been extremely cheesy. It has actually happened in real life as I understand it, with old boxers coming back, and what they do here actually kinda makes sense.

They don't make it seem like the aging Stallone could really go toe-to-toe with the younger man, but they do create a few things that put them on more of a level playing field. But the key is how they end the film. I won't spoiler it, but there's actually an alternative ending on the disc that if they'd used that it would have undermined the whole film, so it's good they went the way they did.

The other clever thing is that there's much more of a focus on Rocky outside of boxing. The death of Adrian forms a core plot-thread, as does his relationship with his brother in law, Paulie.

There's also other non-ring plot threads and it's by focusing on these that make the film a good film, rather than purely a boxing film.

So yeah, I quite enjoyed it, though I still think it's a little daft that after all these years Rocky basically stands there taking the punches.

chrimbo break

I always get this feeling towards the end of a holiday of "what have I actually done?"

Well, unless it's a proper holiday where I've been away, I mean. If it's one of my less exciting "not going to work, but staying at home" holidays I'll almost inevitably have made a great big to do list.

These are like my normal weekend to do lists, but on a much bigger scale. Where the normal lists are basically just notepad files with a big list of stuff to do, these will be done in word, and have a colour-coded table mapping the days and what I'm planning or have to do.

It takes anal retentiveness to a whole new level.

Anyway, despite this level of planning there's always a bunch of stuff that I put down as more general things, like watching DVDs and reading books and stuff, with the idea that when I tick off the appropriate stuff on the timetable, I can do these.

And I think it's these that produce the "so what have I done" feeling, because I don't tend to kill them off in the same way. So even though I did loads of stuff like cleaning my cupboards in the kitchen (I've been there 5 years and never done them once - the grime was thick, to say the least), the fact that I made no real impact on my pile of unread Empire mags means I feel like I've not really been doing anything.

Which isn't to say I didn't do anything on that front. I mean, I even watched some anime. Admittedly, it wasn't much, but it was something.

Actually, the only thing I totally failed to do was any scanning. It's gotten to the point of being stupid now - I've a stack of more than 6 months worth of anime mags and considering I buy 4 a month (plus Nyan type whenever I can find it) that's a lot of magazines to scan.

That also means I've not been watching fansubs. I've now reached the stage where I've started on a new season (it's a half season really) and so I've downloaded all the episodes of loads of shows without watching a single one of them. There must be about 20 shows I need to watch the fansubs of, and that's not thinking about all the stuff that's available on crunchyroll too.

If truth be told the big problem here is Anno 1404 - I'm still playing it obsessively. My ray of light here is that I've resolved to turn the current sandbox map I'm doing into the definitive article. Indeed, I've actually reached the point where I only have 1 item I need to unlock for both the occident and orient and then that's it. Plus the world is relatively well planned out, so I don't feel like abandoning it.

I'm basically thinking that if I can 'complete' this world then I'll be able to put it down for a while. Well, until the expansion pack comes out in April anyway :/.

But on the brighter side I did make some progress in terms of watching US TV series. For example, I've watched all of 30Rock season 1 and am half way through season 2. Plus I've come out of the holidays with nothing stacked up on my PVR - that's definitely a good thing.

So mixed bag for Christmas really - did quite a lot but also didn't do everything I set out to. So a typical holiday, then.

it's snow joke

It was like déjà vu all over again last week.

After my big old couple of weeks off for Chrimbo and the New Year I was supposed to start work again on the Wednesday. I always like to take a couple of extra days and come back mid-week when I have any sort of holiday, because I find that shift to a full working week from holiday quite stressful.

Well my timing weirdly meant that I was coming back on Wednesday and Tuesday night was when it snowed heavily. Of course it had snowed before Christmas and had been pretty horrendous by all accounts, but it wasn't too bad while I was at work and then when it got bad I was off.

In fact, that pre-Christmas snow actually ended when I went down to Devon to visit my Dad - it was milder and rained heavily that morning I went down and that actually cleared away the snow, so my journey down was okay. And of course down in the South west they never have it so bad anyway.

I did have scary moment, though. I stopped at Cartgate services to have a pea and when I was driving out of their I hit some black ice on the road out. I turned left and the car went straight on.

It was my own fault because I was going too fast and it was just lucky that no-one was coming the other way. I didn't make it all the way across to the other side of the road, but I crossed the line marking the middle of the road.

Anyway, the déjà vu came because the snow that fell on Tuesday night was almost the exact same depth at what we got last February. And as then, I was trapped.

To be frank I probably would have stayed trapped as well if it wasn't for the fact that my landlord was going on holiday on the Sunday. That meant that he organised a "digging party" and we dug ourselves out on the Thursday.

Also, what would have encouraged me to stay is that I can actually work remotely from home. Plus, because of my pack rat mentality, I'd estimate that I had about 2 weeks of food that I coudl have lived off of. Admittedly, after a while my diet would have gotten a bit bland - lots of pasta and chicken and rice (which aren't great breakfast choices, in my opinion), but I could have survived.

Anyway, the dig out meant it was worth attempting to come to work on the Friday. The journey wasn't great to be frank. The roads had been cleared a bit, but they were a long way from being properly cleared. Especially when you got off the main roads - the industrial estate I work in was almost impassable and I actually got stuck. Luckily my boss has a 4x4 and was able to tow me out.

I took it steady both going and coming back, especially given my experience before Christmas, but that didn't seem to be the attitudes of most people on the roads - I had loads of people tailgating me, which seems the most ridiculous behaviour imaginable in this weather.

One slip or slide and what would have been me having a scary moment on my own could easily become a horrendous pile-up, just because people weren't giving enough space.

seasons well wishings and a happy new year

And there we go.

So today is my last day of work for the week, the month and, indeed, the year. Since I generally write this blog at work, it's highly unlikely I'll be posting again until the new year, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to leave a festive message up.

Or, to put it simply, I hope you have a good festive period and a happy New Year and I'll see you again when the calendar says 2010!

unff

So the post office on Tuesday was not as bad as I'd feared.

Don't get me wrong - it was busy, just not as busy as I was afraid it was going to be. I'd say it was about as busy as a normal Tuesday, or the end of the month when loads of people get their car tax.

Why do people bother getting their car tax from the post office any more?

You can do it online and it's so simple and easy, once you've done it that way once you'll never want to bother queuing at the post office for it ever again. I mean, seriously - click, click, click, enter your card details, click, and you're done. It really is that easy and simple.

Plus it's all on databases now, so the little paper disk you get is just a formality and they send it to you in the post anyway, so you just do not need to bother going to the post office and clogging up the queues for those of us that want to do proper post office stuff.

But the big surprise was yesterday when I went to post the next couple of e-bay items. There were actually more staff there than customers.

I don't know if it was the snow or the freezing temperatures that were putting people off from going, or it was the timing (last post for 2nd class is Friday and Monday for 1st class, I believe), but I was straight in, no waiting, do the business and out again. Really simple and easy.

Of course now that I've said that when I go there today I bet it'll be queuing out the door again!

This is one of the pain in the arse things with e-bay - a lot of people pay almost instantly, which puts a lot of pressure on you to get their things sent as soon as you can. I also try to do that anyway in order to avoid the dreaded poor rating of course, but it does make things more complex.

The reason being because there's always one or two people who take a while to pay. So, for example, I had about 15 auctions end on Sunday and by Monday morning, two-thirds of them were paid up.

Now I couldn't actually go on Monday as that's when I go shopping, but Tuesday I dutifully lugged all their parcels (plus the couple that had paid by Tuesday) to the post office and sent them all off.

So I was basically left with only 4 parcels unpaid by Tuesday afternoon. I sent them all an invoice by way of a reminder and two people paid up. So I trekked to the post office again yesterday, with only 2 parcels.

One more person paid last night, so I'm going again today.

That leaves 1 person unpaid and I sent them another message yesterday basically saying "if you don't pay by tonight it'll be next week before I send it"... and he's not even acknowledged my message.

It's a right-royal pain in the arse. If I waited until all the auctions were paid I'd piss off the early payers and get poor rating. But this way I end up having to make loads of trips, which is both really annoying and also costs me loads in postage.

This is part of the reason why I get sick of doing e-bay stuff every time I start on a new session of selling stuff. All the lunch-times wasted in post office queues just becomes really draining. Plus of course there's the fact that it gets really annoying the small return I get.

When you look at the total amount I'm supposed to get by way of payment from people winning my stuff, around half of it goes to other people. First off, e-bay charge you insertion fees (!), then they take 10% of the winnings (for doing very little). PayPal take a big slice in fees (for doing jack shit) and then of course there's postal fees (about the only bit I don't really mind, except for the fact that recorded costs too much).

When you then start to consider how much padded envelopes, sellotape and even car park charges cost it all gets a bit depressing really.

And yes, I did say earlier on that we got some snow yesterday. It started coming down about mid-morning, and somewhat to my surprise it settled on the ground. Well. it wasn't really surprising, because it was so frigging cold for most of yesterday the snow couldn't possibly have melted.

It's meant to be okayish today, but then there's going to be a cold snap tonight and heavy snow is forecast for tomorrow around here. I don't expect I'll be dramatically snowed in like the last time. I expect it'll just make the journey to work treacherous.

It's a pretty miserable and rant-filled post today, huh?

Well, I'm tired and I've had too much work to do and my holiday is still two days away.

the illusionist

Rental service was back to normal this weekend with the illusionist.

It's weird how sometimes there's nothing in a particular genre and then several things come along at once. The Illusionist was released in 2006, the same year as The Prestige.

I reviewed the prestige a while back (or if it was before I started blogging, be assured I have watched it) and quite enjoyed it. Why it's similar to the illusionist, if you can't guess or don't know already is that they're both Magic films.

I appreciate Magic films is not really a genre as such, but that's the best phrase to describe them. They're also both based on books and both are set roughly at the turn of the previous century. Certainly they have a Victorian feel to them.

Both are also focused on grand stage magic, rather than smaller sleight of hand stuff and both feature a "grand illusion" as the central crux of the film. Both also try to blur the lines between real magic and mere illusions. They differ mainly in the central theme, I would say. The prestige was about a rivalry between two magicians, where the illusionist is really a love story at heart.

But they're both similar in the sense that both are entertaining and I enjoyed them both.

There's a bit of a difficult nowadays with films based in the world of magic, because we all know that movies sometimes feature a lot of CGI. And CGI is getting to the stage where it's so good that it's possible to make unreal things seem real.

So the problem magic has on the big screen is that the true skill that is behind magic, such as things like misdirection or even sleight of hand, can simply be faked. You don't really need an actual skilled magician, or a clever contraption to pull of a trick in a film, you can just let computers and animators do their thing.

And at points it's quite obvious that CGI is how they're doing some of the tricks. However to some degree, this actually works in the illusionist's favour, because part of the story we're being shown is the idea that maybe the illusionist Eisenheim really can do actual magic.

Part of the idea is that he's so good he's got tricks that people genuinely can't figure out. He's either one step ahead of the current magic skill level or he can do real magic - and by mixing real tricks with a bit of CGI it helps that idea more than it does undermine the practical magic trick side of things.

Something else that helps is the treatment that's been done to the film, which makes it seem like a really old print. Initially I wasn't sure about this, but after a while it becomes kind of natural and really helps you feel that it's a story from that era.

This is also aided by the (roughly) consistent accents everyone uses and some truly involving performances. It's also a good story, with an engaging, well portrayed love story.

So yeah, overall I really enjoyed the film.

post office horror

This last weekend a bunch of e-bay auctions I had up came to an end. This means that today I have the rather un-enviable task of going to the post office. At lunch time.

I wasn't worried about it until yesterday when one of my work colleagues went to the post office. She was gone about an hour and when she returned she said they'd been queuing out of the door.

Now you could say well part of that is because it was Monday and it's always busy on a Monday. But then today is Market day in Alton, and so it's always busy on a Tuesday too.

But adding into that I believe today is one of the last posting days, and I think it's the last posting day for parcels. I may be wrong on that.

Last Christmas post is a bit of a myth actually. My dad used to work at the post office and he said that the effect it had was to get people to post early and therefore in the actual build up to Christmas there was often less post than usual, which meant there weren't many delays.

Of course, if they didn't set a day, loads of people would leave it until late and then there would be too much and it could potentially cause delays :/. So what the last day means is that that's when they stop guaranteeing delivery before Chrimbo. It doesn't mean your stuff won't make it in time, just that it's not guaranteed.

So yeah, lunch could be fun. Plus I'll have to do it all again later in the week, because some people haven't paid yet. Thankfully it's only a couple, plus if they had all paid I'm not sure I could have carried it all, to be honest, so I'd have had to make two trips anyway.